A couple of favorites

Photo on right is a nice one from a few months ago. Winston and Vera in Queen Street, Auckland.

A quiet couple of days after the rush of Thursday.

Good Friday and today were very warm and sunny. We stayed at the house all day Friday and today the only trips were for Matt to take Winston to the library and, later, to go by himself to buy a few groceries and Easter eggs.

NZ libraries tend -- amongst a healthy range of other books -- to have many hundreds of NZ titles, especially autobiographies and fiction. That's noteworthy because relatively few NZ books seem to be easily available in other countries. (Tip to folks interested in NZ: contact one of the thousands of NZ public librarians to get an inkling of what I mean, and jot down some author names. If you really need to do your reading before you get to NZ you will thus be able to order via an international online book-buying site or arrange an inter-library loan.)

Today, looking for a book for Winston, Matt stumbled on a book about the making of a NZ film that is revered in our home.

The film is Alex and, as soon as I've typed that, a generation or two of Kiwis are nodding in familiarity. Many of them read the book by Tessa Duder on which it's based, as adolescents. Alex is about a 1950s Kiwi teen girl who is working for a swimming place in the NZ team for the Rome Olympics.

We love Alex, us.

While we were going through the months of applying to NZ for residence, we watched it time and again:

"I can beat Maggie Benton!" Lauren Jackson, the ex-Auckland-Girl's-Grammar pupil who plays Alex, probably didn't realize that that line, which she pushes out though tears as she sits on her bed with a broken fibula after being whacked by a hockey ball, would be chanted with all its intonations a buh-zillion times by an idiot couple living near Seattle.

And if there's a more winning, cuter ten seconds in film than when Alex is treading water in the practice pool, mischievously cuckoo-ing "Si, senor... Si, senor... Si, senor" to her coach's goadings, we want it brought to us on wholemeal toast.

Back to the Easter weekend: Winston and Dad found at least half a dozen books for Winston, including one all about excavators. He loves construction and wants to know all about each vehicle. And at the moment there are diggers and loaders crawling all over our neighborhood. As you might know, we had one in our own backyard a few days ago.

Come to think of it, if you could fit a digger with a beer holder and a mini DVD player showing Alex, you could leave the three of us happily for about six months.